


Look At Us Both

by objetpetita



Series: Intimacies [5]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Case Fic, First Time, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Slash, not especially canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-05
Updated: 2013-08-30
Packaged: 2017-12-22 13:23:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/913692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objetpetita/pseuds/objetpetita
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock attempts to get over his infatuation with his new flatmate using the time-honored solutions of brooding, misdirection, and avoidance. And of course sex.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story concludes the “Intimacies” series. The chapters of this installment are all already mostly written, so I’ll be posting them on a weekly basis. A very big thanks to everyone who has read and commented and supported! I really, sincerely appreciate the warm response to my first fic.

In a pub not far from the de Vries murder site, Sherlock nursed an old-fashioned and glared at the pockmarked wood of the bar. Silently, he rehearsed the reasons for his current mood, assigning each of them to a dent in the wood as though to an itemised list. 

1: Withholding the solution of a case from Lestrade wasn’t enjoyable in the least so long as the detective inspector failed to notice he was doing it. 

2: The Yard had finally cleared away from the scene of the crime, but flashing lights and fumbling efforts left a very effective neighbourhood-wide paranoia in their wake. Even Sherlock couldn’t charm his way into the building in which the murder had taken place.  

3: He’d slept in John’s bed. It was meant to be an expedient, nonverbal way to foreclose a conversation in which John might persist in talking about feelings—or worse, sexual exploits. Instead, it had turned into an interminable and at the same time far too brief six-hour period of listening to the slow tides of John’s REM cycles. He’d spent the entire time drawing and re-drawing a mental map of the points of John’s body that came closest to touching him every time the doctor shifted in his sleep. 

4: The same flatmate (whose sleeping patterns Sherlock now had engraved into the front door of the mind palace) had been sporadically launching into bouts of falsetto singing for nearly two days now. This was undoubtedly due to John’s recent success at achieving orgasms with a woman he’d managed to pull _while wearing clothes Sherlock had selected and insisted John purchase._

5: Sherlock should have burned the clothes as soon as the undercover work that required them had been completed. 

6,  and perhaps most infuriatingly: Not only did Sherlock now know every word to John’s pop tune of the day, he also knew several made-up versions of the lyrics that John had produced to narrate his progress through the morning’s housework.

And he had been unable to keep from noticing that John had a tendency to lift his chin when he stretched to reach the higher pitches. It resulted in absolutely _deplorable_ embouchure. Still worse, Sherlock found it _cute_. 

_Cute._ A hopelessly stupid word, not fact or observation or anything clever at all. Still, every time John pushed his chin up into the air to hoot about never, ever, ever cleaning Sherlock’s dishes, the word was there, inescapable, etched on the underside of his stubble-rough jaw.

In a swift, jerking motion, Sherlock whipped his mobile from a pocket and opened a blank text, angry with himself for allowing John to derail the listing exercise. 

Surely a mind like his could come up with something, anything, to free him from thoughts of John Watson altogether.

Unfortunately, he’d got into the habit of thinking quite a lot about John Watson ever since the little crackshot in a jumper had materialised in his life. For weeks, he’d been giving his imagination free rein, stealing a minute here and there for idle fantasies. Spinning out what might happen if John looked sideways at him one day and said “Do you know, I’ve just realised I’ve been gay all this time” or “How about a shag, just to see what it’s like” or even just “D’you want to read that article on skin disease over here so I can see it too?”

Stupid. One utterly chaste night in John’s bed was more than enough to demonstrate just how stupid he’d been. His desire for John was unrequited, yes—Sherlock grimaced but forced himself not to un-think the word ‘desire’, just this once—but his _need,_ the bone-deep necessity of John Watson to Sherlock Holmes, was returned in full. John needed him just as he needed John; their perfect, unwavering complementarity was the force that drove John’s cane into the bottom of a closet and Sherlock’s cocaine money into a savings account. No feelings of any kind which might muddle that bond were to be entertained, even for a minute.

Sherlock rapidly typed and sent a text to Molly. On her embarrassingly dated phone, it would probably pop up as three separate messages. 

_What’s wrong?_ came her response. 

_On a case. Want your opinion._

Surely that would work. She was always asking questions about his investigations. 

_No you don’t. That’s just a riddle you made up in half a minute, isn’t it?_

The detective growled into his glass. Damn Molly. Damn John. And damn Mike Stamford, come to that. While he was at it, damn all doctors. The lot of them could go hang. 

His phone buzzed again. 

_If anything really is wrong, Sherlock, I can come and get you. Won’t ask any questions. But if you’re out getting pissed because you’ve had a spat with John or something, I recommend you sort it yourself._

Sherlock raised his eyebrows. 

_How can you tell I’ve been drinking? SH_

_You forgot to sign a text._

Sherlock looked back over the exchange. Bollocks. 

Before he could respond with something likely to turn out to be very rude, an inquiring voice piped up next to him. 

“You all right, man?” 

Sherlock looked up. The speaker was a man on the fitter side of average, late twenties, not a native Londoner but clearly a long-time resident of the city. Gay. Owner of a ginger cat. Out with friends, but not close friends, probably for someone’s birthday. Bored by the group he was with, therefore more likely to start a conversation with a stranger. Purely because it didn’t matter one way or the other, Sherlock decided not to ignore him.  

“Yes, sorry.” Sherlock cleared his throat, waved ruefully at his mobile. “Just, I’ve got idiots for friends.”

The man laughed easily, then cocked his head toward some men who were clustered around one hapless individual—banker, low-level, soft around the middle, would be bald before he turned thirty-five. His celebrants were attempting as a group to force a pink plastic tiara onto his head. It seemed the birthday festivities, as Sherlock had suspected, were in full swing. 

“I can empathise,” said the man. 

Sherlock tilted his mouth up at the corner, which was apparently enough of a show of solidarity that the man felt inspired to clap him on the shoulder. 

“Hope your night gets better,” he said, and then made his way back to the roiling mass of bodies that comprised his less than compelling social engagement. 

Which left Sherlock to observe he had a passably nice arse. Useless information of course, but so long as Sherlock was amassing data that was not John Watson, he might as well notice. Sherlock added it to a temporary file on this man, presumably to be deleted later. 

Another text from Molly materialized, pulling his attention back.

_*Is* everything all right?_

_Fine. SH_

_It’s not a spat with John. SH_

A pause. 

_Sherlock, whatever’s happened, I’m sure it’ll be fine. Just go home and sort it._

Sherlock scoffed. Sort it. Vague, simplistic. Unwelcome adjectives were slipping onto John’s golden skin, catching on the edge of his jaw, on the stray fibers of his jumpers, on the rough skin of his hands. How did people normally “sort it” in this kind of situation?

The point, of course, was that sorting was entirely out of the question. Sorting was impossible because _sorting_ was logical, organized, explicable. With regard to John, though, everything had gone completely out of proportion. Unsortable. For God’s sake, the most powerful observational skills in the world (most powerful, yes, Mycroft could fuck right off because he might be cleverer but Sherlock had better eyesight) were devoting themselves to deducing the length and thickness of one single non-criminal English army doctor’s vocal folds. 

Sherlock rubbed at his temples.

One mustn’t lose a sense of perspective. This was what John’s silly pop songs were about in the first place. Love and sex made a person _feel_ as if everything had gone out of proportion, when in fact nothing about the physical world had changed at all. The human brain was, unfortunately, a solipsistic and therefore fallible apparatus. He could recognise this weakness and overcome it.

The hard edges of his phone, clenched tightly in his hand, brought Sherlock back to thoughts of Molly. Safer territory. 

Yes. Molly. Sherlock thought of her lab coat with cat-claw punctures at the breast pocket, her flat roundish shoes, the way she had apparently liked being called “Moll” by friends during university. 

Conclusion: Molly was a fairly ordinary thirty-something, naturally attractive enough to balance out an awkward sense of humor and unfortunate taste in jewelry as well as pets. 

What might Molly say, then, average human being that she was? If his...  _problem_  was such an ordinary affliction, perhaps all Sherlock needed was an ordinary solution. 

Bits of overheard conversation scrolled through his head, sorting themselves by relevance. Then, aha, yes: _Molly with a phone to her ear in the corridor at Barts, shoulders hunched, feet shuffling. The unmistakeable stance of someone being chastised. Her quavering little voice saying, “Thanks for listening, Mum.” Then, in the tone of someone repeating instructions, “Get over him. Yes, I know. I will. Or I’ll try, anyway. I promise.”_

Mulling the memory over, Sherlock signalled for another of the same. The barman nodded once in acknowledgement, and Sherlock spared a moment to appreciate the simplicity of the interaction. If only all communication could be so clear. Economical, even. “Get over him,” indeed. What, after all, did “getting over him” entail? Molly’s side of the phone conversation had afforded no specific instructions. “Getting over him” afforded about the same level of the linguistic finesse as her earlier suggestion to simply “sort it.”

It was entirely possible Sherlock would have continued to scoff himself into three to four more drinks, then simply gone back into his flat alone. Except then John’s favored pop song careened onto the pub’s sound system with all the subtlety of a rugby tackle. Unbidden, Sherlock’s imagination unfurled a very vivid image of John’s Adam’s apple bobbing, the muscles of his jaw flexing. 

The same shock Sherlock had come to expect from every time their fingers brushed over a mug of tea or a mobile phone raced up Sherlock’s arms, followed closely by a familiar dull ache in his chest. 

Which meant his little _problem_ was beginning to manifest without direct physical stimulus of any kind. Sherlock sighed. Perhaps it was time to give the ordinary solution, imprecisely as it might be formulated, a try. 

Next question, then, would be how one traditionally went about “getting over” a romantic attachment. A few creative Google searches on his phone turned up several sources which recommended sexual activity with an individual who was not the object of one’s unrequited attachment. The practice was infantile at best, simply diverting attention from one thing by placing a similar thing nearer by. But the partial success rate suggested by the internet did outstrip Sherlock’s so far fruitless attempts to simply think himself out of it. 

Sherlock turned in his seat, stealing a glance in the direction of the raucous birthday celebration occurring near the back of the bar. The man who’d spoken to him before was easy to pick out, though his back was turned. His stance was relaxed, though he refrained from returning in kind the thumps on the shoulder and generally boisterous comments bestowed upon him by his fellows. He was out to his (mostly) heterosexual friends, then, but not so thoroughly comfortable as to share in the banter about sexual exploits and such things. 

Sherlock considered. After weeks of staring down John’s towel-clad arse every time his flatmate walked from the shower to his bedroom, sex was becoming an increasingly appealing prospect. And even if it wasn’t coming from the individual he primarily wanted, perhaps the act would nonetheless provide some much-needed release. 

Idly, Sherlock wondered if he would be any good. Having deleted all of his previous sexual experience in favor of storing more useful information, he had no way of knowing whether his previous sexual prowess had been instinctually or experientially acquired. 

All this was, of course, presuming that the man was interested in the first place. It would require a touch of personality suppression on Sherlock’s part, probably, but that was easily done. 

The tilt of the man’s head suggested his drink was nearly gone, so Sherlock stood, refusing to give himself time to falter. Surely negotiating a casual encounter could hardly be difficult; idiots like the chap finally drunk enough to consent to wearing the pink tiara did it all the time. 

When he reached his target, he lifted one hand to the man’s shoulder. The muscles beneath his palm did not tense at the contact—civilian, upper middle class, unused to danger, accustomed to encountering friends and acquaintances in public spaces. He rotated into the touch to turn around. His face registered surprise at seeing Sherlock standing there.

“I wondered if you might let me buy you a drink.” Sherlock pitched his voice low. He may have deleted sexual experience, but he retained the list of which of his traits people tended to find attractive.

Someone whistled. Sherlock raised an eyebrow, mostly to highlight his disinterest in the rest of the group, but also because it might call attention to his eyes, which were another item on the list.  

The stranger smiled, still surprised, but doing a passable job at recovering. “Sure,” he agreed. 

The man detached himself from his fellows, a few of whom seemed to have been knocked a bit sideways by Sherlock’s approach. 

“I seem to have startled your friends,” Sherlock remarked when they had new drinks in hand. 

“You sure did.” The man touched his glass to Sherlock’s. “Forget them. I’m pretty sure two of them are closeted as fuck.”

Sherlock smirked. Three, actually, but not far off. 

 

- 

 

Sherlock woke when the weight on the bed shifted. Sun filtered through his bedroom curtains. Morning, but early still.

“All right?” he inquired without thinking. It was odd of him, but—ah. Instinctive, he realised. Increased fondness in the aftermath of shared orgasms—the result of hormone levels, brain chemistry. Funny that it should work that way even between two people who barely knew one another.

“Ah, yeah. Just having a piss, back in a minute.” A hand dropped onto his ankle. 

“Here.” Not bothering to open his eyes all the way, Sherlock dropped a hand to the floor and scooped up a pair of pyjama bottoms. By way of explanation, he added, “Flatmate.” 

“Thanks.” A warm hand on his, then the swish of fabric pulled over skin. The door clicking gently shut. 

It was odd again that Sherlock should feel gratified by it, the simple fact of another man in his pyjamas. It was neither entirely about the sex nor entirely about the clothing, though it had something to do with both. Sex, sleep, shared clothes. It was satisfying, in a deep-seated, inarticulable way, thinking of someone else’s skin inhabiting fabric that belonged to him. 

Upon exiting the bathroom, the footsteps faltered. Brief moment of uncertainty—sleepy disorientation, bad sense of direction. Sherlock smirked indulgently as the telltale squeak of floorboards announced his companion taking a wrong turn. 

“Oh! You must be Sherlock’s flatmate.”

Sherlock’s head popped up, freeing both ears to listen. John must already be up, already installed in his chair, already flipping through the paper. The very thought of John zinged up his body, cold and hot at once. John’s feet, bare, flat on the wood floor. John’s fingers, smudging the newspaper print as he flipped each page. Distracting—the best and achiest kind of feeling. Sherlock’s skin felt tight. 

Ah. So. Sex with another person obviously did not dissipate attachments to blond, medically trained, hopelessly heterosexual flatmates. 

It filtered into Sherlock’s consciousness that an unusual amount of time had passed in silence. His brow furrowed in confusion. Then, as if on cue, two voices spoke at once. 

“John?” said one. 

“What the _hell_ are you doing here?” said the other.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Delighted to be posting a couple of days earlier than I expected!

John and Keith stared at one another for another silent, uncomprehending moment before John pointed a single finger at Keith’s lower half. "Why are you wearing Sherlock's..." 

A sheepish grin raced down Keith’s face, starting at his eyebrows and settling on his lips. 

Suddenly, the gears in John’s head were juddering to a halt. “You can’t be serious,” he told the other man. 

Keith gestured helplessly, palms turned up to the ceiling. He looked halfway between mortification and outright laughter "This was absolutely not on purpose," he managed. "I swear, if I'd known he was your flatmate I'd have checked to make sure you were all right with it. Or send a warning text, at the very least." 

But the world had gone entirely lopsided. As if there could be any such thing as a normal, run-of-the-mill one night stand when Sherlock Holmes was involved.

“No, I mean, you cannot be serious,” John persisted. “Sherlock does not have casual sex. I didn’t think Sherlock still knew _how_ to have sex!” 

Keith bit his lip. 

“Ohh _no,_ ” John jumped in quickly, reading the look on the other man’s face. “You will never tell me what you did in there. You will tell me nothing regarding my flatmate’s dick, where it’s been, what he’s done with it. And nothing that even begins to approach a comparison to... to anything, ever.” 

“Absolutely wouldn’t dream of it,” Keith assured, eyes dancing. 

John maintained eye contact long enough for a firm nod, then looked down at his watch. Barely seven o’clock. And His Majesty often didn’t deign to rise til lunchtime, the plummy bastard. John sighed and forced himself to remember this wasn't even the most awkward thing he'd faced because of Sherlock bloody fucking Holmes.

“Can I offer a cup of tea? Coffee?” he offered, trying to pretend Keith was any other person in the world, not the first bloke he’d ever slept with standing in the sitting room naked save for Sherlock’s— _Sherlock’s—_ pyjamas.  

Keith rubbed the back of one hand against the palm of the other. He shifted from foot to foot. “That’s fantastic of you to offer, really,” he said. “But,” he cleared his throat, “I think I’ll grab a little more sleep for now. I, um. Had a late night.” 

John gave up on pretending and covered his face with both hands. “This isn’t happening,” he said into his palms. 

Keith giggled apologetically, then paused. And then giggled again. 

John peered over his fingers. “What?”

“God, sorry, it’s just I’m not great with directions... The bedroom’s this way?”

John groaned. “Yes,” he sighed. “Straight back, through the kitchen.” 

 

After the bedroom door clicked shut, John did manage to resist the urge to press himself against it to eavesdrop, but it was a near miss.

Jesus, he felt like an idiot. He’d been so smug, thinking he’d managed to confound the deductive powers of the great Sherlock Holmes. He’d thought the new developments in his sexuality were his to disclose. He’d even considered how he might unveil them, the next time he and Sherlock had one of their midnight tête-à-têtes. But then, hell, he’d also thought Sherlock spent the night staking out a murder site.

The newspaper print slid out of focus before his eyes, but John’s mind was elsewhere. What had Sherlock and Keith talked about? Were they talking now? Was it about him? Had Keith mentioned his night with John? God, he hoped not. 

The embarrassing truth was, he’d wanted to tell all this to Sherlock like he'd wanted to show Harry his rock collection when they were kids. He'd wanted to sneak into Sherlock's bedroom, open up his hands and say, _Look, I've found something, isn't it fantastic._ He'd wanted to save it for those soft, hazy nighttime minutes, when their odd budding friendship seemed like the very axis of the earth’s rotation. 

But now the night with Keith seemed pale and drained, like it was pressed flat on a slide beneath the sharp blue-white light of Sherlock’s microscope. The sheer breadth and depth of how well Sherlock could know him—and how he could never know Sherlock—stretched up before him, incomprehensible and oppressive.

It wasn’t the secret itself: John didn’t give a flying fuck about being or not being “out.” If, that is, a single sexual encounter with a bloke even constituted something to be “out” about. 

No, the thing making John’s skin itch all over was the _quality_ of Sherlock’s rebuttal: elaborate, wordless, calculated. In exactly the way only a Holmes could devise. Sherlock hadn’t even needed to be in the room—Sherlock _would_ think that was elegant, wouldn’t he—for the message to be received, neatly folded and silently conveyed: _I will always know more about you than you know yourself._

This felt just like watching Mycroft read his therapist’s notes aloud, demand a look at his left hand, then smile as though John were a bland but not altogether unpleasant amuse-gueule. All without so much as giving his own name first. 

Somewhere in Sherlock, John knew, there was a man who liked hugs, a man who would rather sleep in your bed for a night than say out loud that he valued your friendship—a man who’d only come close to telling John he cared after he’d been frightened into it by finding John bleeding on the street. 

But Sherlock was also, and more often, an arrogant genius. 

John thought of Keith’s face, the way it had fallen open at John’s touch, so easily offering up clues as to what Keith wanted, what he was thinking. So unlike Sherlock’s gaze, which, for all the breathtaking play of darting black pupils and blue irises shivered with silver and green, gave exactly nothing away about what was going on behind it. If the poles of his universe were Keith’s brand of ordinary, uncomplicated friendliness and Sherlock’s unforgiving panopticism, John wanted to turn tail and flee toward the former. At least for now. In light of this whole _not_ -not-gay thing, his sense of self was newly unformulated, and more fragile than he’d realised. 

And he needed, very much, to get out of the flat. 

It was cold out. Feeling reckless and just a touch vengeful, John grabbed the blue scarf from the hook it shared with Sherlock’s coat and wrapped the soft wool around his neck. It felt satisfying, like invading Sherlock’s space could balance the way Sherlock had apparently invaded his entire life. 

Next, he fired off a text to Mycroft. 

_Address please. Will need to be sending you polite apology card bc am abt to sherlock your bank account. JW_

The response was instantaneous, and, if John squinted, looked a bit like permission. 

_John, believe me when I say your instinctive frugality (and fully developed adult sense of proportion) will prevent you even beginning to imagine the damage to my accounts when they’ve been properly Sherlocked. MH_

“That’s probably true,” John conceded aloud, stomping his way down the stairs.

 

First, he fortified himself with a leisurely breakfast at Speedy’s. Then, he set about having a full day of actively ignoring his horse’s arse of a flatmate. 

 

Michael at the shop was overjoyed to see him back again. John solicited his fashion expertise, manufacturing a soppy story about throwing a surprise party for Sherlock’s birthday. He took especial pleasure in gushing over their “relationship,” looking forward to Sherlock’s abject horror when he found out about the plush bears and bouquets of roses he was supposed to have peppered John with throughout their courtship.

John stepped out of Michael’s shop feeling quite polished in a pale blue shirt and grey chambray blazer. A dash of purple peeked out from his breast pocket. He’d even gone so far as to agree to a double-breasted wool coat Michael recommended to wear over it all. He put the whole thing on Mycroft’s tab and didn’t feel the least bit guilty about it. 

In the interest of not giving Sherlock even the smallest opportunity to glean a reaction out of him, he ignored the texts that began appearing on his phone starting at half past twelve. He took a cab back to Baker Street and dropped his old clothes in a bundle just inside the front door, then left again. He would apologise to Mrs. Hudson later for the mess. 

He filled the afternoon with walking. He walked until he found a place he’d never been for lunch. Then he walked some more, until the cold had well and truly seeped into his skin, and then he stopped again for dinner. 

 

Eventually, John found himself in front of the club. His phone had vibrated exactly fifteen times since midday and he still had not bothered to look at the screen. 

“Hey—John, right?” someone said. John turned, recognised one of Keith’s friends. 

“Yes, hello,” he greeted, extending a hand. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name.”

“Jared.” The man gave his hand an extra squeeze. “New to the scene? If you don’t mind me asking.” 

John felt a touch of color rise in his cheeks. “Is it really that obvious?”

His new acquaintance smiled. “You were looking hesitant. I’ve got friends inside; d’you want to join us for a drink?” 

John felt himself relax into the simplicity of it. “God, yeah, that’d be great. Thanks.” 

Shortly, with John in tow, Jared attached himself to a small group of friends. John followed as they each paid at the door, accepted the club’s stamp on their hands. John smiled ruefully at the fresh ink on his hand. It was getting to be a familiar sight. Lucky thing it washed off easily; if he was going to continue having a sexuality crisis, he was going to have to look professional enough to get a job to fund it. 

The group filed in toward the bar. Where, John quickly noticed, Keith was not working tonight. Then there was a bit of dancing, which was fine but not especially exciting. John eventually used the excuse of his empty glass to excuse himself from the group. 

He settled himself with a whiskey at the bar and just observed for a while, taking a broad, diffuse sort of pleasure from all the bodies moving past one another on the dance floor, the shoulders brushing against his as people shuffled up to buy drinks. 

 

Some amount of time passed, punctuated with periodic vibrations in his pocket which he assumed were Sherlock’s doing. Before long, a waifish figure with a stylishly asymmetrical haircut caught his attention about six seats away at the bar. 

It was the bloke he’d seen with Kit de Vries the first night in the club, though this time he was alone. He kept glancing toward the dancing crowd, wilting a bit more each time. Without any particular plan in mind, John wandered over to the empty space next to him.

Up close, his eyes were a touch big for his face, which made him look like a confused baby animal of some kind. They were little bloodshot, too.

“Not having a good time?” John ventured.

The slim man grimaced. “No,” he confirmed. His eyes travelled again toward the opposite end of the room. John followed the gaze this time, recognising Kit de Vries swaying, off the beat, at the edge of a constellation of dancing people. 

“I’m trying to decide,” the thin man continued, “if I’m on the worst date of my life or if it was never a date in the first place.” 

“Hm.” He had a hunch that the hapless bloke beside him might be the same fellow he’d overheard with de Vries in the bathroom cubicle. John craned his neck to get a better look at de Vries, who was carelessly bumping up against another man's arse. What little sympathy for de Vries he still had was quickly disintegrating. “If he’s all the way over there while you’re over here, sorry to say it, mate, but I don’t think he’s worth the trouble.”  

The other man heaved a sigh. “He is, though. I think. He’s my best friend in the world.”

John raised one eyebrow. His impressions of the obviously-not-bereaved twin so far had not seemed to merit this kind of loyalty.

“And he’s _brilliant,_ ” the dark-haired man went on fervently, but his brow betrayed him, crinkling uncertainly. “So brilliant I don’t think he’s human sometimes.”

John snorted. “Oh, it's like that. You too, eh? I’ve got one of those myself. He’s an absolute shit most of the time.” 

The man blinked. His mouth went suddenly soft at the corners, and John hoped he wasn’t about to burst into tears. 

“Sorry—god, I’m sorry.” The man shook his head. “I’m actually getting weepy over it. Jesus, that’s pathetic.” 

John clinked his glass against the other man’s, confident the threat of tears had adequately receded. “We’ve all been there,” he offered. 

The man raised his eyes gratefully. “Ben Pinsky.”

John grinned. “John Watson.” 

 

It wasn’t much later when Kit de Vries drifted over, interrupted the conversation with a too-hard peck on Ben’s face, and said goodbye without a sideways glance at John. 

John watched it happen in slightly tipsy sympathy. “Come on,” he suggested after de Vries was gone. “Let’s take that booth in the corner and get embarrassingly pissed. We can trade stories about socially nonfunctional best friends, all right?”  

 

The rest of the night passed in a thoroughly enjoyable rush. 

 

“He’s a violinist,” Ben said into his fourth gimlet, “for the LSO. Fucking best violinist they’ve got.” 

“Hm.” John was engaged in the careful project of folding a paper napkin into a crane. “Sherlock plays the violin as well. Screeches on it masterfully when he’s cross.”

Ben watched John’s fingers fumble with the wrinkled paper. “He plays it badly?”

“No, he’s actually well trained, I think. He just likes ugly sounds exactly as much as he likes beautiful ones.” 

Ben stared back with his silly, watery eyes, fascinated.

 

“And then in walks _Keith_ , while I’m sitting there with the newspaper!” 

Ben was a good listener; he gasped in all the right places. “So he... with the same guy you...”

“Yes! He deduced it!” John waved a drink around. “He must have done. I never have a clue how he does it.”

Ben made an astonished sound. “If he’s that good, d’you think he can tell every time you wank?”

John’s mouth fell open.

 

“He’s acted so _strangely_ recently,” Ben confided. “Truth is, I’ve wanted him since I met him ages ago, and he knew it all along. Then this terrible thing with his brother happened—he was burglarising flats in my neighborhood, you know, armed and everything—and I thought, I dunno, maybe the fright of it made Kit realise something about, about us.” 

“So you started dating?” 

Ben gestured expansively. “We spend so much time together, we might as well have been dating before.” He jabbed a finger a few times at a lime wedge floating at the top of his drink. “The thing that changed is we started fucking.” 

“Was it any good?”

Ben shuddered. “Bloody awful. I bet I could manage a more satisfying sexual experience in my mother’s house with one hand tied behind my back.”

John spat a shard of ice back into his glass.  

“Or in a moving car wearing only one sock and my landlady in the driver’s seat,” Ben insisted. 

John succumbed to a fit of giggles. 

 

They progressed to ordering off the cocktail menu because John admitted he thought the colorful garnishes were funny. 

“Is my tongue blue?”

“A bit,” John reported. 

They kissed a few times, purely because they could.

 

John sat with both elbows on the table, chin in his hands. The position was helping him not to sway in his seat. 

“Twenty-seven,” he said. 

Ben looked up from the spiral he was drawing on his hand with a pen they’d nicked from somewhere. “What?” 

“Just got another text.” John patted his pocket. “That makes twenty-seven texts Sherlock’s sent me since I left this morning.” 

“Maybe he’s worried.”

“If he were worried, a secret service agent would have appeared here to escort me home.” At Ben’s amused look, John shook his head vehemently. “No, I mean it. Holmeses are _terrifying._ ” 

 

“He’s leaving _tomorrow,_ for God’s sake. For _New York._ And he couldn’t be arsed to say a proper goodbye.” 

John positioned one lopsided napkin-crane atop the other in an artfully lewd position. “Maybe with him being away, you can move on. Get over it. Have a nice rebound shag. Like the one these two cranes are having.”

Ben took a wobbly look at John’s sculpture. 

“Personally, I like it better when the bottom’s on the top,” he commented.

 

In the end, John poured his new acquaintance into a cab and caught one for himself, bracing himself for the Conversation he knew he was going to have with the undoubtedly still-awake, still-a-bastard flatmate waiting for him back at 221B. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which some things are resolved at last. 
> 
> Bit of formatting confusion on this one, posting in a bit of rush as a result. Please let me know if anything is amiss!

If he’d given it any thought, Sherlock would have expected John to react with surprise. Discovering that the same flatmate whose previous commentaries on sex were “not my area” and “deleted it” was suddenly engaging in casual sex would surely warrant a bit of John’s fantastic monosyllabic spluttering. It was a comical kind of spluttering—it made John’s mouth twist around, made his eyebrows furrow together in that prickly way that, much to John’s chagrin, was only ever endearing. John really was a delight in socially awkward situations. 

Everything seemed to be more or less on track, too—though with the odd added element of John seeming to recognise Keith from some other context. A patient, maybe. Or a friend of Harriet’s? Sherlock had to admit he had not pursued much personal information past Keith’s first name. 

In any case, what Sherlock had not expected was for John to react with revulsion. 

“Ohh _no_ ,” John’s voice filtered through the walls. “You will never tell me what you did in there.” Still in bed, Sherlock leaned forward, listening hard. “You will tell me nothing regarding my flatmate’s dick,”—Sherlock’s knees curled up protectively, involuntarily—“where it’s been, what he’s done with it.”

The sting that followed was unexpectedly sharp. Sherlock re-buried his head in the pillows. It felt like a rejection. Not because he’d ever so much as entertained the thought of John wanting anything to do with his dick— _obviously—_ but because he’d also never thought John might actually find the idea of Sherlock having sex _distasteful._

Had his relationship to sex been palatable to John only when it remained a distant spectre, safely locked in the half-light of deletion? Was considering Sherlock in an erotic context really so unthinkable? Perhaps John’s “it’s all fine” had been nothing short of optimistic.

He feigned sleep when Keith returned and then, after a few hours of turning it over in his head, roused his bedmate with the loudest oral sex he could manage. Unfortunately, the demonstration was to little avail: when they emerged from Sherlock’s room, John was nowhere to be found. 

“I ran into your flatmate this morning on the way back from the bathroom,” Keith mentioned over what meagre breakfast Sherlock managed to clap together—just tea and a slice of toast each. 

“Oh?” If Sherlock attacked his toast with an overly aggressive bite, Keith did not notice. 

“Mm. It’s the funniest thing: I actually sort of... know him. He’s only just started coming in to the bar where I work.” Keith chewed once, thoughtfully. “Very sweet guy.”

Sherlock snorted. Everyone thought he was _sweet_. It must be one of the benefits of having a vacant, stupid face like John Watson’s. 

“If you like half-intelligent, neurotically tidy men with frightful taste in clothing,” Sherlock said, glaring at John’s mug beside the sink.

Keith sat back in his chair, draped one arm across the other in a way that was a touch too casual to have actually been casual. 

“Look, Sherlock, anyone can tell you and John aren’t exactly, um.” He paused to search for the right words. “I mean, I know it might not seem like you have much in common.” Sherlock wrinkled his nose, but Keith pressed on. “But surely you know what it’s like to be in his position, right? If you care about John, at all, as a friend... you might just talk to him, see how he’s doing. I think it might be nice for him to have someone reach out. Someone who’s been through it already.”

The man was speaking in a code Sherlock knew he should have been able to unravel, but the sting of John’s dismissal was still fresh. Sherlock didn’t bother to work it out.

“ _Fuck_ John.”

Keith coughed awkwardly. 

“Sorry.” Sherlock rubbed his eyes. “Just... flatmate stuff.”

“Hey, no worries. I know how it can be,” Keith said, raising a placating hand. “There’s a reason I live alone.” He waited a beat. “Forget I said anything.”

Sherlock obliged. 

 

He wasn’t alone in the flat for a full ten minutes before his resolve crumpled and he texted John. 

_Where are you? SH_

He made it another half hour before he did it again. 

_Need you at Baker Street. SH_

 

_Why aren’t you responding? What could you possibly be doing? SH_

Eventually, the uncertainty drove him to try going to Barts to continue the ongoing set of eyeball experiments, but he only made it as far as the front door. First, he could not find his blue scarf in any of the usual places. He made a mental note to have a talk with Mrs. Hudson about moving his things about. 

The Barts plan was entirely derailed, however, when he found a pile of clothes just inside the door of 221B. Sherlock picked over the mound right away, crouched at the base of the stairs up to their flat. 

John’s, obviously. They’d been worn that day. John had breakfast at Speedy’s, obviously, but that hardly accounted for the duration of his absence. There were no large stains or tears to provide a reason to change his entire outfit, and no sign of what he might have changed _into_. One thing was certain, though: he’d divested himself of his clothes and deposited them just inside the door, more willing to leave a mess than to risk encountering Sherlock upstairs.  

Something expanded and contracted in his chest uncomfortably. The thought of John Watson naked was tremendously distracting, but the question he needed to focus on was why John Watson was avoiding him. Surely simple disgust at the thought of Sherlock having sex did not warrant this level of avoidance, did it?

Data. He needed data. 

_Are you out with no clothes on? SH_

_Stop being an idiot and come home. Kettle’s boiled. SH_

_I need to store eyeballs in your RAMC mug. SH_

_Am considering your silence as consent. SH_

_You don’t own a coat warm enough for this weather. SH_

_What are you wearing? SH_

_I know you have your phone; I have verified that it is not in the flat. SH_

_Is this anger? Why are you angry? SH_

_You’re being childish. SH_

_This reaction is excessive. I don’t understand. SH_

_Who is Keith, John? SH_

_Come home. I do not understand what I’ve done wrong. SH_

_What have I done? SH_

_You’re only making this more awkward than it already is. SH_

_If you don’t explain it to me, I don’t see how you expect us to proceed. SH_

_You can’t outlast me; I will be awake when you return. SH_

_I need to know when you’ll be home. SH_

_I need to know you’ll be home. SH_

_Please. I won’t bring it up again if you just come back. SH_

_I need a flatmate, John. I cannot live alone. SH_

_Fuck you, John._

_Fuck you._

_Fuck you._

_Come back._

_Please._

 

“Hello,” said John. 

Sherlock opened his eyes. John’s bleary—seven drinks, liquor not beer, spaced over a period of several hours—face jutted into his line of sight, sideways, as Sherlock lay supine on the sofa. Sherlock narrowed his eyes. John was wearing the blue scarf. Over a new shirt, blazer, coat, jeans, even pants. It both explained everything and clarified nothing at all. 

At a glance, none of it was John’s usual taste, which is to say all of it was taste _ful_ , especially the blue shirt. That particular blue, and the buttons on his cuffs—clearly the work of Michael-with-the-tall-hair but _how_? Why?

“D’you want tea?”

It took a few seconds for John’s question to break through the storm of half-finished deductions, but eventually Sherlock nodded. 

John turned on his heel, walked toward the kitchen. Sherlock followed, observing. John was relaxed, shoulders loose from the pub, his movements only just slightly sloppier than they would normally be. No sign of feeling awkward, no anger in his stance, no annoyance in the tilt of his head. Conclusion:

“You didn’t read my texts.” 

“No,” John confirmed. “I wasn’t, er. After this morning, honestly, I didn’t want to give you any more ammunition than you already apparently have. Not before I felt more comfortable with the.” He cleared his throat. “The whole possibly-a-bit-gay thing.” 

Even accounting for seven drinks, John was achieving new levels of incoherence. 

“I am gay,” Sherlock supplied, as clarification on this point seemed like it might help. 

John threw teabags into mugs, making one on the first try and needing three attempts to get the other one in. “I know, I know,” he said, nonsensically. 

Spicy notes drifted into the air as he poured water over the teabags. Sherlock closed his eyes. Tea, John’s soap, gin and curaçao from the drinks, the citrus of John’s new cologne. The almost inaudible click of the second hand traveling round the face of John’s wristwatch. Here were some of the most comforting things in his entire life, now suddenly limned with uncertainty. And all because of his stupid _problem,_ this idiotic bundle of _feelings_ lodged in his chest. 

God, this was intolerable. He wanted John to leave again. But then again, he really didn’t. 

“Maybe I should’ve talked to you from the start,” John was saying. “I suppose, even though you’re, well, _you_... you do have an idea of what it’s like, in my position.”

_“...But surely you know what it’s like to be in his position, right?”_

Keith’s words from that morning. Sherlock had taken a step forward before he knew he was doing it. 

“You were referring to _yourself_ ,” he blurted incredulously.

John looked startled, but whatever he’d been wittering on about was not as important as the _damn turn-ups on his jeans_ , for God’s sake, and the fact that, yes, _yes_ —Sherlock jabbed one long, imperious finger at the hand wrapped around the mug of tea John was about to hand across to him. 

“The stamp,” he accused. John looked down at his hand, alarmed, uncomprehending. “No stamp from a club would last for days afterward,” Sherlock observed, “so you’ve been there again, and you liked it, didn’t you, because you’ve ordered off the cocktail menu. The clothes, Keith, possibly-a-bit-gay—stupid, _stupid_ —I failed to make the most _basic_ —”

“Wait,” John cut him off. He frowned. “Who else would I be referring to? Have this conversation at my speed, you bastard, or we aren’t having it at all.”

With some effort, Sherlock closed his mouth. Synapses kept firing, however; nothing he could do about that. His brain had lit up like a Christmas tree. The implications of the day’s events were unfurling, bright and blinking before his eyes.  

John took a loud, deep breath, clearly a suggestion that Sherlock do the same.  

But the deductions had careened to their endpoints. It felt as though someone had knocked him square in the face with a book. Or a computer. Or maybe a fucking table. The vibrations of it travelled down through his chest, leaving an empty, cracked-open feeling in their place. 

It was Keith, Keith all along who’d spurred John to the singing, the new cologne, the relentlessly cheerful mood. Not such an unbelievable coincidence: the crime scene, the club de Vries frequented, and the pub Sherlock had selected to sulk in all lay within a half mile radius. It had been obvious all along that Keith lived and worked in the area as well. 

And what it must have looked like to John, that very morning, seeing Keith in the flat... John must have thought... oh, God, it was almost funny. 

“Ah,” said Sherlock. 

John furrowed his glowering little brow. “What?”

“You’ve been labouring under a misapprehension.” He stepped backward, brisk and carefully disinterested now. “In this _particular_ instance,” he took care to emphasise, “I’m afraid you have overestimated my abilities.” 

It was fine, of course. If John was suddenly pursuing a sexual interest in men, that is. It was nothing to do one way or the other with Sherlock’s little problem. Just because John was interested in men didn’t mean... anything, really. 

One small, irrational corner of his heart was nonetheless reeling with the realisation that John actually _had_ suddenly gone a bit gay. And that the extent of Sherlock’s involvement in it had been to supply John with the perfect outfit for the job. 

John hadn’t moved, was still standing there with a mug in each hand. 

Sherlock sighed. He explained, enunciating clearly, “My intentions with regard to our... mutual acquaintance”—John arched one eyebrow—“were far more pedestrian than you credit.”

An angry flush rose in John’s cheeks. “Right, of course,” he growled. “You, what, just happened upon Keith in a bar and thought, yes, all right, tonight I feel like breaking my years-long celibacy for no reason at all?”

Sherlock shrugged. “It really isn’t such a confounding coincidence, John. If you’d spent any significant percentage of your brainpower considering it, you might’ve noticed that he prefers trim men who are five to seven years older than he is, and that you look like you fall into that range even though you’re actually older—” John’s eye twitched, perhaps best not to dwell on that one—“and that he, you, and I have all been spending quite a bit of time in the same part of town recently. Not to mention the fact that both of us are generally drawn to people with broad smiles.”

His flatmate’s eyes narrowed to knife points. “But you never bring blokes home.”

“I think you and I can agree that that statement is no longer true.”

John was clearly still frustrated, but his anger was waning. “Sherlock, if you are fucking with me...” he intoned. 

“I’m not,” Sherlock said quickly, losing, only for a moment, his air of put-upon detachment. 

John pursed his lips. “You didn’t...” His nostrils flared as he took a few deep breaths. “...Deduce who I’d been with and then spend the night with him yourself in order to show me how wrong I was to think I could keep a secret from you?”

“Flattering, in a way,” Sherlock drawled, “but no.”

And Sherlock folded his raging, keening heart into the tiniest package he could manage. He cleared his throat, accepted the tea from John at last, turned on his heel to return to the sitting room. 

John followed, apparently not yet finished. “It wasn’t some Mycroft-shaped, passive-aggressive plot designed to make me feel like an idiot?”

Sherlock couldn’t help the twist of disgust that passed over his face, but that turned out to be for the best, since it made John laugh. Relief washed over John’s features, unlocking his brow, relaxing the muscles in his jaw. “Damn it,” he said, smiling broadly. “I’m an idiot, but I guess you knew that already.” 

“Yes, good to see you’ve caught up,” said Sherlock, wearing thin. He deposited himself on the sofa, prepared to return to the only place he could be properly alone. 

“Oi,” came the voice behind him. “Stop it, I can see you going into your head again.” John approached and prodded his shoulder, hard. “Let’s have a bit of normal first, eh? Have you finished the de Vries case while I’ve been off being a twat?”

“Hm?”

“Have you solved the murder?” John articulated each word crisply. 

Sherlock frowned. “Obvious.”

“Lestrade’s still investigating, you know. Something about de Vries’s gambling debts.”

“Wrong,” said Sherlock as he rolled sideways off the sofa. From his new position on the floor, he was able to look at John up the entire length of his body, ankle to forehead. It was not an angle he’d ever seen John from before. Unfortunately, it afforded no new data to explain John’s sudden swerve away from a course of life-long heterosexuality. 

John wiggled the toes Sherlock had trapped beneath his shoulder. “You might let the rest of us in on the secret,” he insisted. “And the murderer is?”

Sherlock lifted the fabric of John’s jeans, exposing the smooth knob of his ankle. He inspected the flesh there, the line where John’s leg hair started, the movement of John’s tendons beneath his skin. For whatever reason, John permitted this without comment. 

“Martin de Vries,” he muttered absently, tracing the circle of John’s ankle with a fingertip.

John’s weight shifted from one foot to the other, but he didn’t step back. After a beat, in which it became clear that Sherlock was not about to go on without prompting, he spoke again. “Yes, well done, we are talking about who murdered Martin de Vries.” Sherlock snorted. John ignored the interruption. “Have you figured it out?”

“Mm.” Sherlock dropped the fabric and returned to studying John’s face. “The question you should be asking is, who is Benjamin Pinsky?”

John paused. “Hang on, I know that one. Are you being a shit, or are you really asking?”

Sherlock raised an eyebrow. 

John sighed. “Well, if you’re really asking, what I know is he’s an architect, best friend of Kit de Vries, gay. Adores, um, Tippett. Also adores Kit de Vries, come to that. He’s probably sitting at home right now, hoping de Vries texts him before he swans off to New York in the morning. And... I think Ben mentioned having a sister—er, maybe two. Why? What does he have to do with anything?” 

Sherlock blinked up at him. John’s trousers were still clutched in his fingers. 

“What?” John demanded.

Sherlock sat up, deciding to return to the question of John’s ankle and his sexuality at a later time. “Put your coat back on,” he directed. “We’re going.”

“Jesus Christ. I’m still a little _drunk_ , Sherlock!”

Sherlock was already down the stairs, rushing out to wave for a cab. 

 

In the cab, John appeared to be doing his level best to push sobriety back into his head via the eye sockets. 

“The window de Vries fell from, John—seriously, do you just close your eyes and wander through the crime scenes we go to?—it’s in the flat on the third floor, which is being rented out to none other than one Benjamin F. Pinsky.”

An interminable pause. John left off palpating his conjunctiva for the moment. “What, really? Did... did I just have drinks with a murderer?”

Sherlock opened his hands, turned them palms-up. “You tell me,” he invited. “I haven’t been able to gain access to Pinsky or his apartment, and somehow you’ve managed to blunder your way into his confidence. Tell me _exactly_ what he said.”

 

By the end of the cab ride, several pieces were slotting into place. John’s especial talent for accidentally producing useful knowledge was truly in top form. 

“Where are we going?” it finally occurred to John to ask. 

“The home of Christopher de Vries.” 

“Okay. Why? Do you think he’s in danger? From Pinsky?”

Sherlock drummed his fingers on the seat, on his thigh, on the seat again. “Think, John. Really think. Do you really believe a top-notch violinist for the LSO preparing for a week-long tour overseas would allow his fingernails to go unclipped?”

Before John could respond, the cab rolled to a stop and Sherlock leapt out onto the street. He could hear discontented sounds behind him as John paid the cab fare and jogged to catch up. 

Soon, Sherlock was banging loudly on the door of de Vries’s flat and John was hissing about disturbing the entire building at four o’clock in the morning. The man who answered the door was sleepy, disheveled, and clearly annoyed. 

“Hello,” Sherlock greeted brightly. “I’m Sherlock Holmes, and this is John Watson. We need to have a look round your flat.”

De Vries glowered. 

John, bless him, jumped in before Sherlock was forced to gain entrance by taking more physical measures. 

“Sorry, Mr. de Vries, we’re, ah, with the police and we’ve had recent developments in the case of your brother’s murder.”

De Vries’s eyes widened tellingly. John incorrectly interpreted the source of his alarm and rushed to offer reassurance. 

“Not to worry,” he insisted. “You’re not in any danger so long as we’re looking out for you. If you’ll let my colleague here just take a look around, I’m certain we won’t need to delay your departure to New York later this morning.” 

Also incorrect, but John would figure that out soon enough. And it did convince de Vries to step out of the way and motion them inside. The twin seemed at last to have woken up enough to attempt speech, and rasped out a half-hearted, “Anything I can do to help with the investi—”

“Condolences on your rather unusual case of sudden-onset tendonitis,” Sherlock interrupted, rifling through the open briefcase on the floor of the lounge. Really, it was too easy.

De Vries tensed. Sherlock performed a quick calculation: John had paused to wipe his shoes on the mat just inside the door, and de Vries had followed Sherlock down the short hallway, which positioned him facing the sitting room, his back to John. Thus, if he moved to engage either of them, he was much more likely to lunge after Sherlock himself, which was just fine, as the narrowness of the hallway would inhibit de Vries turning around to counter when John inevitably came to Sherlock’s aid.

“I don’t have—”

“Tendonitis? Of course not, no,” said Sherlock, “but you plan to, do you not? Just in time to bow out of rehearsal tomorrow night, I imagine.”

De Vries stuttered, which was boring. To speed things along, Sherlock took hold of the passport tucked into the front pocket of the briefcase and held it aloft. De Vries visibly puffed up as Sherlock advanced, backing him into the hallway, toward John, who was watching them silently, carefully. Figuring it out by now.

“I think I’ll need to hold onto this for the time being.” Sherlock injected just a hint of sing-song into the sentence, enough to make it sound like a taunt. De Vries’s face turned a fantastically unflattering shade of purple. 

Then, it was the work of a moment to appear distracted by a sound from the street. Sherlock turned his face to the side, giving de Vries the opportunity he was waiting for. 

As predicted, the twin surged forward, fists inexpertly clenched. 

It only took one glancing contact between his knuckles and Sherlock’s cheek before John was atop him, calmly holding him facedown in the carpet. 

“I think I see now, Sherlock,” said John, not even breathing hard. “Why would a bloke take advantage of his best friend, all just for a quick blowjob in a public bathroom? The answer is because he’s not really a friend at all.”

“Correct,” confirmed Sherlock, ignoring the way his skin prickled at seeing John with his knee planted between de Vries’s scapulae. “Overacting, Mr. de Vries. Not unlike what you’re doing now,” Sherlock commented over the man’s ineffectual squawks of protest.  

“I don’t know what you—”

“Oh, please,” Sherlock sighed, tapping experimentally along the now-bruised cheekbone. “You’ve overplayed it. Game’s up, I’m afraid.”

When Lestrade finally trudged into the flat, looking thunderous, John was still firmly holding a disgruntled ginger down in the hallway and Sherlock was halfway out the window, having moved on to performing an experiment concerning the splatter patterns of sandwich bags filled with various household liquids. 

“Ah, Lestrade,” Sherlock greeted, ducking inside. He tossed the last bag (which contained shampoo) carelessly to the floor. “Allow me to present the _actual_ Martin de Vries.”

 

“Admit it. If it weren’t for me, you’d have just continued to put off the case until Lestrade finally acknowledged your sulk. Martin de Vries could have been long gone, escaped to America.” 

Sherlock turned his head to hide a smile. He watched his own reflection in the cab window slide over the passing scenery. “Yes, yes, very good, John, et cetera et cetera, your haphazard social aptitude produced astonishingly relevant information, well done.”

John giggled. John always giggled after getting to tackle someone to the ground. “Thank you,” he said grandly. 

Silence fell in the cab. Sherlock kept his eyes trained on the passing buildings, street lights, the occasional early-morning jogger. _Ask me_ , he thought, though he already knew John would. John always did. 

“All right, tell me,” said the blond, right on cue. “What’d I miss?”

“Oh, John, you’ll have to be more specific,” Sherlock returned airily, noting and then ignoring the warmth blooming just beneath the surface of his skin, spreading to the very tips of his fingers. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still in the process of honing the craft of porn-writing, so I've made a few minor edits to this chapter since its initial posting.

“Kit de Vries considered his recent birthday a noteworthy turning point,” Sherlock was saying as they neared Baker Street. “Sentimental reasons of some kind; neither interesting nor important. What is important is that he wanted to reconcile with his twin brother, even though, as we know from Martin’s debts, the gambling was worse than ever. Martin would have agreed to meet again purely out of the hope that Kit would offer to help him financially.”

“And I assume Kit didn’t?”

“Correct.” Sherlock glanced downward, where John’s left hand was idly curled on the seat between them. Redness on the knuckles where they’d been scraped over de Vries’s carpet. Familiar, squareish fingernails. The vein that corded over the wrist, up to the middle knuckle. Not as pronounced on the nondominant hand. Sherlock had the idea of bending John’s fingers backward, curling them forward, observing how that vein shifted over the flexing tendons. 

Meanwhile, John was looking across the cab at him, waiting patiently for more. Sherlock went on, ignoring the fact that he’d dropped his own hand to the cab seat, curled like a mirror image of John’s smaller, darker one. He punctuated the story with a few sharp gesticulations of his free hand—that is, the hand that was not accompanying John’s and absorbing (probably) an incalculably small amount of John’s body heat. 

“The dinner marked the first of Martin’s many crimes of opportunity,” he explained. “Somehow, Martin got hold of Kit’s mobile or laptop—mobile much more likely. Kit leaves it on the table at dinner or forgets it in the cab, Martin sees the opportunity, takes the phone. With access to Kit’s contacts, calendar, Facebook, Martin had no trouble at all arranging burglaries at the homes of Kit’s coworkers and friends.”

“How—”

“Police reports, got them from Lestrade. Burglaries of people in Kit’s circle, neither thorough nor efficient, but always perfectly timed on a night when that person was at an event or party which Kit de Vries also attended.”

John’s lips parted, just a little bit. It was stunning. 

“But Martin has a weakness—you saw it tonight. He went too far. Too much too fast—he had to work quickly with the information he was able to glean before Kit deactivated his old phone and got a new one. Then, Kit, who was probably not an idiot, put the pattern together. He must have been at Keith’s club for a party when he realised where the next break-in was likely to be. Too embarrassed to tell anyone about it, he went alone to confront his brother.”

John looked appalled. “So Martin _killed him_?”

“I doubt it was on purpose,” Sherlock allowed. “Martin would have overreacted, initiated a physical confrontation—just as he attempted to do with me. Kit ended up on the wrong side of the window, which provided Martin with yet another opportunity.”

Comprehension fell across John’s face. “A way to escape his debts entirely.” 

“Mm,” Sherlock confirmed. “The victim wasn’t _shaving_ in a hurry; he was _shaved_ in a hurry. With Ben Pinsky’s unfamiliar shaving kit. To finish it, Martin de Vries planted evidence from the body in the flat he then ruined on the floor above Ben’s, to ensure no one would think to include Ben in the investigation.”

“Because he knew the brothers had got back in touch.”

Sherlock nodded. “Conveniently, Kit de Vries was every inch a violinist’s stereotype. He thrived in a demanding, competitive career which affords a very public sort of recognition to those who are successful in it.”

“You’re saying he was a prima donna.”

Sherlock flashed a winning smile. “We are not, as a group, known for our humility.”

John snorted. 

“The point is, it isn’t difficult to impersonate a man who maintains close friendships only with people who worship him blindly.”

John rubbed two fingers over his bottom lip, considering this, and for the briefest moment, Sherlock wished they were somewhere else entirely. The high of the case was bleeding dangerously into something warmer, deeper in his belly. Usually he was able to keep the two separate: the cases were in his head, and the problem of John resided... well. Everywhere else. But things had got jumbled somewhere along the way with this one, with Keith and the club and the stamps and John’s hands. 

Sherlock snatched his hand up from the seat.

“There isn’t much more to it,” he went on, shoving both hands into his pockets. “All Martin needed to do was to identify his brother’s body as himself and to inform the police that he’d not seen or heard from his ‘brother’ in years. Then drop a hint about the gambling debts, and you know the rest already.” 

 

 

“Sherlock,” said John, back at 221B.

“What?” Sherlock paused, arm outstretched. He was standing behind his flatmate, reaching around John's shoulders to hang his coat on its usual hook. John had been fumbling with his new buttons and Sherlock hadn’t felt like waiting for him to finish before divesting himself of his own coat.

The smaller man rotated on the spot, which brought Sherlock to the sharp realisation of how close he’d been standing. Then, John licked his lips. There was absolutely no way, in this position,  _not_ to watch. 

"We're best mates, yeah?" he inquired, his expression inscrutable for once. One short, decisive nod was all Sherlock could manage. His mind was on the fact that he was going to need to retire to his room. Quickly. Before a single molecule of John's breath this near to him faded from his memory. "And you," John murmured, "you would tell me if I... overstepped?"

Sherlock nodded again. He breathed shallowly, not wishing to disturb the moment, whatever it was. His flatmate’s eyes travelled up and down his face. The tongue made another appearance. Exquisite torture. 

“Okay.” John stood there, chest rising and falling more quickly. “Then. What would you say if I.” He paused, as though Sherlock should know by now what he was asking. When Sherlock didn’t respond (or move a single muscle), he tried again. His voice wavered in a way Sherlock had never heard before. "I mean, would it be completely inappropriate for me to..." He trailed off, staring meaningfully at Sherlock's mouth. Blindly, Sherlock leaned forward, looming into his friend's space. 

And John caught him in a kiss. His smooth pursed lips pressed up into Sherlock’s, far too briefly. John was pulling back before Sherlock had even processed what had happened. His cheeks bloomed with color. 

“D’you want to sleep in my room tonight?” said that mouth. Every nerve in Sherlock's body was focused on the words curling out of John’s insufferably pink lips. “It’s just... You’ve started having casual sex for the first time in a decade, and I’m... well, I’m apparently gay for the first time in four decades.” He grinned, nervous but eager. “We could celebrate.”

Which was when Sherlock forgot entirely about his coat. It fell to the floor in a billow of black. His fingers flew, unbidden, to the soft fabric of the scarf that was still wrapped tightly around John’s neck. Distantly, he realised the washed-soft fibres would smell of John now. He pushed his hands beneath the wool, feeling rather than hearing the soft sound John let out at the chill lingering on Sherlock’s skin. 

Both men stared silently for a moment, while Sherlock summarily dismissed any and all doubts that threatened to cross his mind. Faltering, deciding if it was worth the risk, bloody _thinking_ could wait until the morning. He wanted, now—would take, now, whatever he was offered.

And so it was Sherlock who finally closed the miles and miles that separated John’s mouth from his. He parted his lips and then John’s tongue was in him, light, gentle strokes making his heartbeat rattle madly through his chest. 

Sherlock brushed John’s Adam’s apple with the pad of a finger. The tongue caressing him retreated as John took in a short gasp. Seizing the opportunity, Sherlock dove forward, invading John’s mouth. A groan, ravenous and sweet at once, rattled out of the shorter man, and Sherlock devoured it. When he at last allowed himself to break for air, he stayed with his mouth nearly touching John's, reluctant to back away any further. 

“Taking that as a ‘yes,’” said John. “Come upstairs,” he commanded. 

Delirious with the kiss, Sherlock stayed close as John divested himself of his coat, his shoes, the scarf at last. They left everything on the floor and stumbled up to John’s room, never not touching—shoulder to shoulder, a hand on an arm. Somewhere along the way, John rested his palm against the small of Sherlock’s back and Sherlock’s spine lit on fire. As soon as they crossed the threshold of John's room, Sherlock wasted no time finding John's mouth again. 

John was warm and confident, matching Sherlock’s force with surprising coyness—parries with his tongue, tickling teasing brushes of his hands. When John’s palm skimmed over Sherlock’s zip, the detective gasped raggedly and went limp, burying his face in John’s neck. 

“God, you’re wound tight,” John commented, tilting his head to open his throat to Sherlock’s teeth. “Is this pent-up from years of abstaining, or is this how you always are?”

“I don’t know,” Sherlock rumbled into John’s skin. “Both.”

John’s fingers twined in Sherlock’s hair, gently. Taken by a powerful need to taste him, Sherlock tilted his head to the side, opened his mouth wide, and pressed his teeth to the front of John’s throat. That captivating Adam’s apple skittered against his tongue as John swallowed. Vibrations hummed through his teeth—John, breathing hard, not panting exactly but... laughing. Sherlock drew himself up to look as tall and unbothered as possible when he inquired, "Not good?"

“No, it—” John’s eyes traveled downward to where his hands were coming up to rest on Sherlock’s chest, “—it is good. Very good.” He smiled, then slowly pushed Sherlock’s top button through its buttonhole. Which, of course, was as good as an invitation to return the favor, so Sherlock left the Adam's apple aside for the moment and applied himself to the task at hand.

And undoing John’s clothes was fucking Christmas. Sherlock did it all at once and, the very moment he'd got them off, knocked John backward onto the bed. John hadn’t been nearly as efficient, so Sherlock was still wearing trousers when he followed, straddling his flatmate and pressing him into the pillows. 

The look in John’s eyes was astonished—clearly aroused by being naked while Sherlock was still partly clothed. Intriguing. John’s cock, fully hard, jutted against Sherlock’s belly. Sherlock stared openly, absorbing every detail. John’s glorious face was flushed all over, the color spilling down his throat to the top of his chest. His hips moved beneath Sherlock’s weight, seeking contact. Sherlock lowered his face to John's, ran his nose along John's jawline, captured John's mouth with his own. He nibbled at John's bottom lip and John gave a deep moan.

“Sherlock,” John said into his mouth. Sherlock hummed. John’s hands moved up his thighs, cupped his erection through his trousers. The kiss grew more forceful as John’s tongue took charge. The doctor’s blunt fingers pulled open his zip and a warm palm slipped into his trousers to rub him through the thin cotton of his pants. A sound not unlike a whimper fell out of Sherlock’s mouth and into John’s. “Let me see you,” John requested, fingers curling gently around Sherlock’s balls. “Please, let me.”

Sherlock sat back, lifted up a bit to allow John better access, watched John’s deft hands pull the waistband of his pants out and over his cock. John made an appreciative noise and Sherlock gasped as John took him in hand, stroking upward and giving a clever twist on the head that made Sherlock’s vision spark. "Yes," breathed John. His fist tightened.

“Don’t stop,” Sherlock panted. He’d been hovering on the edge ever since he’d got his fingers twined between his own scarf and John’s pulse. “Fuck,” he rasped, barely recognising his own voice. Of course he’d known, intellectually, that John’s hands were broad and rough-skinned, warm and precise, but it was another thing entirely to _feel_ it on his dick. He thrust into John’s touch, engulfed in John’s smell, his skin, his bed. He lost himself in the knowledge that it was _John_ touching him this way, _John_ ’s voice gasping out commands and encouragements like “Fuck, that looks fantastic” and “Yes, come for me, Sherlock, yes” and “Kiss me, _god,_ yes,kiss me. _”_

Sherlock crashed into his orgasm full force, hands flat on the bed on either side of John’s head, hips snapping in counterpoint to John’s steady strokes. John stared avidly between them as Sherlock’s release striped his belly and cock. 

Euphoria sang through Sherlock's veins. His sensations were muddling into one another, like he was grinning with his entire body. If all of 221B had suddenly lit on fire, he didn't think he could be moved to stop kissing John.

Gently, John deposited Sherlock’s softening dick back in his briefs. Sherlock rolled to the side, stretched himself lengthwise long the hard ridges and valleys of John’s body. Languidly, he wrapped a hand round John’s stout, rosy (glorious, wonderful, incomparable) cock. John hissed as Sherlock’s fingers traced slippery trails of come up and down his shaft.

“Tell me,” Sherlock murmured, leaning close to John’s ear. “Tell me what you want.”

John arched. “Like that,” he whispered. “A little tighter”—Sherlock squeezed—“yes, that’s brilliant, Sherlock, you’re fucking brill— _ah_ , oh fuck—” 

Sherlock grinned into the scarred shoulder beneath his cheek, watching John's belly shudder as he lapsed into rapid, stuttering breaths. He was thick and warm in Sherlock’s hand, the slick head of his cock leaking. "Talk to me," John pleaded. He shifted the arm round Sherlock's shoulders, spread all five fingers wide in the middle of Sherlock's back. He drew Sherlock in, clutching so that they were pressed together. Sherlock could feel John's entire body, taut and ready.

He lifted his mouth to John’s ear once more. “Shall I tell you what I’ve observed?” he asked, letting his lips move lightly against John’s ear. The other man keened, hips thrusting into Sherlock’s hand. Sherlock laughed, low and soft. The end was swiftly nearing, he knew—John was nearly levitating himself off the mattress at this point—but he couldn’t bring himself to care, to try to prolong it. 

“You like mouths,” Sherlock informed him. “Your ears flushed the moment you heard my voice this close.” John’s hips snapped even harder. “The novelty of male anatomy hasn’t worn off yet, obvious from your visual fascination with my orgasm.” John’s hand had travelled up into Sherlock’s hair, gripping tightly this time. His eyelids fluttered madly.

Sherlock dropped his voice to the lowest pitch he could reach. “Your facial muscles shift minutely with the pitch of my voice,” he noted, watching John’s jaw slacken. “You’ve an ear for music but you never studied as a singer. Conclusion...” Sherlock chuckled, gave John’s earlobe a good hard suck. “I’m beginning to think you are better at the clarinet than you’ve led me to believe, John.” 

John came, right then, with an utterly glorious, throaty groan. Sherlock stroked him through it, stealing one more satisfying lovebite at the join of John’s neck and his shoulder. 

 

Clean-up afterwards was amusing. John needed two flannels to scrub his chest clear of their combined efforts. Sherlock didn't offer to help, electing to merely watch from within a haze of satisfaction and exhaustion. John groused good-naturedly about lazy fucking flatmates, or something along those lines. 

And then John, ever the gentleman, even went so far as to shuck Sherlock’s trousers off for him and to pull the blankets up for them both. Sherlock rolled onto his side and allowed John to settle in behind him, cupping his body in a way that was far more comfortable than Sherlock would have ever thought it would be.

He would wake up before John, of course. He made a short list in his head and tacked it on the wall in the front room of the mind palace. Wake up. Review and secure the memories of this evening’s events. Delete the texts on John’s mobile. Agree to whatever John was going to insist on discussing with regard to mutual orgasms between flatmates. And then, finally, prepare for everything to go back to the way it was before.


	5. Chapter 5

Sherlock woke with a start.

John dislodged his nose from where he’d been nuzzling behind Sherlock’s ear and rubbed a slow circle over the detective’s shoulder blades. Sherlock blinked up at him, the fog of sleep clearing away from silvery eyes. 

They were in John’s bed, Sherlock curled into a ball and John tucked behind him. John had actually already gone for a piss, brushed his teeth, showered. When he came back to get dressed, he’d found Sherlock still snoring peacefully in his bed. 

Up until then, he’d been thinking they’d have breakfast and coffee, do their respective post-case work, and then he’d prod Sherlock into a quick conversation about the night before. This was, after all, hardly the first time he’d fallen into bed with a friend. They’d do a bit of joking about it, diffuse any residual awkwardness, and everything could go back to normal.

But it was arresting, seeing Sherlock asleep in his bed. Legs tangled in a sheet, knees tucked up toward his chest. It was the first time John had ever seen Sherlock Holmes seem _small_. Purely for the novelty of it, John figured he might as well climb right back in and put off the back-to-normal for another hour. Which quickly led to ear-nibbling, because a person couldn’t just _look_ at porcelain skin like that.

Sherlock’s eyes widened now as he realised he’d woken to John’s teeth on his earlobe. John grinned down; this morning was simply bursting with novelties. The world’s only consulting detective was half-lidded with actual _sleepiness._ Someone should alert the presses. 

“I was asleep,” Sherlock said.

“Very sorry to have interrupted,” John replied. 

“No, I mean, _I_ was asleep,” Sherlock rumbled. “ _Me._ ”

“Shagged out, I suppose.” John tried not to sound too smug about it. 

Then, in the space of a second, Sherlock’s eyes went from groggy to sharp. Ah, such fleeting novelty. 

“What have you done while I slept?” demanded the detective. His legs elongated abruptly—jesus, were they bloody _retractable_?—and he rolled to face John. “No, shut up, I can see it already.” His gaze swept over John’s face and head. “You’ve showered but you haven’t got any clothes on,” he observed. “Went through your normal routine, but something stopped you halfway...” Sherlock raised a hand, rearranged the hair on top of John’s head as though hoping a clue would drop out of it. He narrowed his eyes. “What stopped you?”

John cocked his head to the side. “I’d have thought that’d be obvious.”

Sherlock frowned. 

John studied the curve of Sherlock’s lips, watching for sarcasm but finding none. Half of a giggle escaped him, puffing into Sherlock’s face and making him blink. This was Molly’s jangling earrings all over, wasn’t it? Sherlock’s immunity to people coming on to him. 

Well. They had already slept together. Twice, if you counted the night they really did just sleep together. John felt confident about the odds of Sherlock at least making an effort to decline the offer politely if he wasn’t interested in the morning shag John had in mind.

John leaned close. Might as well make things perfectly clear, since apparently he was dealing with Spock's earth-bound twin. “I wanted to know if you fancied another go,” he said, directly into Sherlock’s ear. 

Breath rushed out of Sherlock in a rush, like John had punched him in the gut. 

“Oh,” he said. 

Promising. John grinned and sucked a tiny lovebite into his friend’s neck. Best move slowly: one really could never know when Sherlock was about to rocket out of the room babbling about an urgent and delicate phase in his ongoing eyeball experiments. 

“So.” John prodded the pulse point in Sherlock’s neck with his tongue. “I thought  maybe I could suck you off. I’ve only just recently discovered that I’m quite good at it.”

The detective arched delicately upward and the sheet slipped down his stomach. One layer of pale cotton did little to hide a growing hardness between his legs. John angled his head so that he could continue working on Sherlock’s neck while getting a good view of the ridge of fabric slowly rising up from Sherlock’s belly. 

Sherlock moaned. A hand twisted into John’s hair. 

“Another go?” John murmured into the detective’s jaw. 

“Yes,” whispered Sherlock. He gasped as John’s fingertips traced the outline of his erection. “But.”

And then two surprisingly strong hands clamped down on John’s hips. John caught a glimpse of—god, was it really?—playfulness in those blue-grey eyes before he was decisively flipped around to face the wall. Sherlock’s warm, long body shifted close behind him and a firm length nudged up into the cleft of John’s arse. 

“I want,” Sherlock said, his hips grinding gently into John, “if you’re interested, that is, I want to...” His hips traced an eloquent rhythm against John’s backside. 

A flicker of nervous heat crept up John’s spine, and every hair on his body stood at attention. The rigid pressure between his arse cheeks was unfamiliar, to say the least. Intrigued, he angled his hips, allowing Sherlock to slip deeper. The full contact of warm, hard flesh against his arsehole was strange at first, but then Sherlock ground his hips forward. 

John gasped. That was good. It was very good. With every thrust, his nerves lit up as though Sherlock had found some kind of “on” switch he hadn’t even known he had.

“Yes,” he panted urgently. He craned his neck so that he could take Sherlock’s mouth with his own. “There’s, there’s lube and condoms in the, the...” 

“Obviously.” Sherlock was already leaning back to reach for the bedside table. 

Then came the sounds of Sherlock rooting loudly through the contents of the drawer, managing not to lose the rhythm of his hips against John—damn the man’s long bloody arms. Which were attached to those long, pale fingers. Which would shortly be pressing into... 

John shut his eyes, anticipation and nervousness tangling together in his chest. Each sound was deafening in spite of its familiarity: the crinkle of foil, the click of a plastic cap, the slick burble of lubricant. 

Sherlock turned away for a second to put on his condom, and then the hardness was back, but more slippery now. Sherlock’s narrow chest heaved against his spine. "John." Sherlock's voice wavered, making the name into a question. 

John reached a hand back to touch Sherlock’s mad, sleep-mussed curls. “Yeah,” he answered, pulling the detective in by the hair. He planted a firm kiss on Sherlock’s lower lip, which Sherlock’s hips returned by jolting forward. “Go on,” he urged.

Sherlock returned the kiss with a flourish of tongue that shot an eager pulse right down into John’s cock. “All right,” he murmured. “Tell me if you—”

John hummed impatiently and sucked Sherlock’s lip into his mouth. 

Then, finally, a slick fingertip rubbed him gently, massaging around his entrance. A small sound issued from Sherlock’s throat, something John couldn’t manage to classify among the sensations flooding him. 

Then, Sherlock’s finger pushed inside and John swore, embarrassingly loud. His eyes were wide open now, and his field of vision was full of Sherlock’s face. The detective hovered close, his brow furrowed like John was an especially inscrutable clue.

“Good?” he inquired. 

“Very good,” John wheezed. How had he managed forty years without anybody ever letting him in on the secret that having your arsehole touched felt _fantastic_? He felt a bit betrayed. 

Sherlock added another finger, his tongue playing roughly over John’s. “Touch yourself,” he suggested, voice even, like he might be recommending a good book. John's hand closed over his penis and he had to allow that Sherlock was absolutely right, in this as in all things.

Sherlock eased him open, one finger at a time. John panted and gasped all the way through it, unable to focus long enough to strike up any sort of rhythm with the fist on his cock. This was an invasion unlike any other sexual sensation he’d ever had.

When Sherlock finally pulled his fingers away, John keened, feeling startlingly empty. 

But then Sherlock’s cock pushed in and John forgot how to breathe. Conflicting sensations warred all over his body. He wanted more and he wanted less, everywhere, all at once. 

“God, a cock is thicker than fingers, isn’t it?” John observed, trying for levity while he focused on breathing through the feeling of being utterly, profoundly overtaken. 

A broken-off hum sounded behind him.

“Sherlock?” he ventured. The detective’s face was pressed hard against the back of John’s head, his nose jutting into the base of John’s skull. His breathing was erratic, almost as though he was fighting off hiccups. 

“Sherlock,” John repeated. “Are you all right?” He moved a hand to where Sherlock was gripping his hip and squeezed Sherlock’s fingers gently. 

The hand tensed on his hip in response. Sherlock released a shaky breath onto John’s neck. When he spoke, his voice wasn’t anywhere close to steady. “Tell me,” he requested hoarsely. “Tell me what to do.”

He sounded lost, desperate, and it occurred to John that maybe this was just as unfamiliar and overwhelming to Sherlock as it was to him. The thought, for some reason, soothed his jangling nerves. All right, then. If there was one thing John Watson was good at, it was asserting order in heart-pounding situations. 

“Okay,” he soothed, rubbing his hand over Sherlock’s. “Start slowly,” he instructed in a firm voice. “Fuck me, Sherlock.” 

Soft, half-formed syllables dropped from Sherlock’s lips, incoherent and clearly involuntary, as he obeyed John’s command. His hips pulled back, pushed in again. John sighed as his muscles fully relaxed into the slick drag across nerve endings that felt utterly brand new.

“God, that’s good, Sherlock,” John breathed. “Come on, then. Fuck me. Go a bit faster.”

The hand on his hip tightened as Sherlock struck up a quicker pace. John’s balls nearly broke out into song with the pleasure of it.

“Holy fuck, yes,” John encouraged. Sherlock had fallen quiet behind him now, timing his thrusts, and the rhythm was good but it wasn’t enough. John needed more. 

“Let me see you,” he requested. “I want to see your face.”

Sherlock propped himself up on an arm and loomed up into view. His eyes were wide. Tendrils of dark hair bloomed out of his head in every direction. John could see the muscles of his shoulder flex minutely in time with his thrusts. 

“Faster,” he whispered, drinking in the sight. Sherlock bit his lip and obeyed, staring silently into John’s eyes. One of them—John honestly didn’t know if it was him or Sherlock—moved their clasped hands from John’s hip to his chest.

Pleasure was twisting and building deep in John’s belly, but there was something else there too, twining into his awareness of Sherlock’s cock inside him, Sherlock’s arm wrapped around him, Sherlock’s hips slapping against his arse. 

“Kiss me.” Sherlock’s fingers clutched at John’s and he leaned in, the change in position making his thrusts shallower, gentler. The kiss followed in the same vein, soft and sweet. John sucked at Sherlock’s pliant lower lip. 

The change in sensation stole John’s breath all over again. The heady urgency of being thoroughly fucked was suddenly replaced with something much more difficult to wrap his mind around. He felt marvellously, burstingly full with Sherlock, and somehow hollowed out at the same time.

And then Sherlock whimpered, distracting John from the unexpected emotions coiling at the center of his arousal. The odd pitch of Sherlock’s voice, the bright crack where there was normally nothing but dark smoothness, overtook him. His arousal spiked hard and he threw a leg back over Sherlock’s hips, a move which shifted him lower and seated Sherlock fully in his arse. Sherlock’s mouth fell open in surprised pleasure. 

Pleased, John rolled his hips a bit and let loose a stream of breathless profanities. He kept their bodies close and moved minutely on Sherlock’s cock, grinding back onto him, watching the detective’s eyelids flutter. 

“Talk to me, Sherlock,” John commanded, moving their still-clasped hands down to his own leaking cock. 

First, Sherlock muttered something utterly garbled, which was, frankly, quite satisfying. John ground his hips down harder. “God,” the detective eventually choked out. “You’re bloody...” He tightened his grip on John’s prick. “You’re bloody gorgeous.” 

John moved their hands faster. He’d never heard Sherlock call anything gorgeous. The sheer novelty of it catapulted him toward his orgasm. “More,” he pleaded. “Please, don’t stop.”

“You’re incandescent,” Sherlock told him. The sound of that voice, saying these words, filled John to the brim. “I want to see you—show me, John—you’re absolutely—”

John pulsed over their hands, onto his chest, bliss crashing over him in waves that seemed to go on forever. Sherlock held him tightly, talking warm, sweet nonsense all through John’s cries of pleasure. 

When John subsided at last, Sherlock swept a vest up off the floor and wiped a bit at his heaving chest. “Thanks,” John murmured, reaching back to stroke Sherlock’s flank.  

Sherlock hummed, then tossed the vest back to the floor. John eased himself up and off Sherlock’s erection, hypersensitive skin tingling. When he turned to look into his friend’s face, though, Sherlock’s eyes flitted to the ceiling, avoiding his gaze. 

“What’s wrong?” John demanded. 

“I...” Sherlock paused, studying the ceiling as if he’d never seen it before. “I hope I haven’t, um.” He cleared his throat. “I didn’t intend to say...” His hand fluttered in the air between them.  

“Oh,” John said, surprised. “No, I. I mean, I got off on it, didn’t I?”

Sherlock’s eyes darted sideways to study John’s face. “It wasn’t... too much.”

John shook his head. “No,” he said honestly. Sherlock seemed to relax. “I think I got a bit caught up in the moment as well,” John admitted. “Difficult to keep things sorted into neat boxes when you’re, well, doing _that._ ”

Sherlock steepled his hands in front of his lips. 

A broad grin spread across John's face. The man was completely absurd. Stark naked, hair looking irrevocably debauched, lying there on his back with his gaze focused on god-knows-where in the mind palace, all with a raging hard-on— _still in a condom,_ by the way—popping up out of the black thatch of hair at the join of his legs. He knew it was probably bad form to laugh out loud at your bedfellow, but he couldn't help himself. 

With the air of a person disturbed by a child during a very important grown-up task, Sherlock put his hands down and swivelled his head around to stare at his flatmate. 

“Sherlock,” John huffed in helpless amusement. “Is that it?” 

Surprise registered on Sherlock’s face. He followed John’s meaningful glance downward. “My primary objective was to get you off,” he said blankly.

John raised both eyebrows. “And I’m very pleased with the results, believe me,” he assured. “But do you know, I’d sort of hoped I could get _you_ off as well. If it doesn’t cut too much into re-shingling the mind palace or whatever you were heading off to do just now.”

Sherlock glanced again at his erection, then back to John. “Yes,” he said a bit awkwardly. “I mean, no. It doesn’t.” 

“Fantastic,” said John, stripping the condom off decisively. “Then I’m going to shamelessly investigate the possibilities of my newfound lack of a gag reflex.”

Moving between his friend’s legs without any further preamble, he took Sherlock deep, accompanying the bob of his head with firm strokes of his tongue. It wasn’t long at all before John felt the man beneath him start to tremble and gasp. 

But, John noted with surprise, this was different from the time with Keith. It even felt different from the sex they'd been having ten minutes ago. Sherlock's odd little bout of awkwardness had shifted the air between them, and John felt a slow, hungry warmth subsuming the raw, sharp hunger of before. Looking up the length of Sherlock’s torso, John marvelled at the perfect round O of his mouth, the startling vulnerability in the way his eyes clamped tightly shut. John couldn’t have looked away if he’d wanted to. 

Because here, stripped and bare in every sense, was the man who’d brought John back from scrabbling half-heartedly at the edge of a terrible grey life. Here was Sherlock Holmes, shorn of his usual defences, laid out helplessly beneath John’s tongue. Anyone who called this man a freak was a bleeding idiot, because Sherlock Holmes was   brilliant and indescribable and a hundred times more alive than anybody else.  

John stared wonderingly on as Sherlock arched and yelled and came. He swallowed his friend down, feeling a torrent of affection flood him, threatening to burst him apart. 

Fuck. This was more, much more, than he’d planned on. This wasn’t just casual sex anymore; suddenly, this was... sheer, blinding intimacy. 

Well. Fuckity bollocks. John let his friend’s cock slip from his mouth and he crawled back up the bed, lying down on his back next to Sherlock. The detective had thrown his arm over his eyes, and John was glad for it. He didn’t much fancy having Sherlock read his thoughts on his face at the moment. 

_All right, Watson. Put things back in their proper boxes, you idiot._ “I did tell you,” he said, knocking an elbow against Sherlock’s. 

Sherlock brought his arm down and seemed to be considering something. “We could do this, sometimes,” he said after a moment. “If you wanted.”

John _wanted_ to say yes. Every muscle in his body was purring with exhausted satisfaction; his dick was practically screaming at him to agree to it and just ignore the emotional consequences. But... no. If sleeping with Sherlock was going to wreck him like this every time, eventually he’d need whatever he was feeling to be reciprocated, and then it’d be _John I’m flattered by your interest_ all over again. It had been awkward enough the first time, and John hadn’t even _been_ interested then. 

“I think it’s best if we leave it at a one-off,” he said, making his voice casual. “I think otherwise it might... muddle things.” 

Sherlock glanced at him, then back to the ceiling. He nodded silently. 

“Right.” John scooted down the bed and stood. “I’ll make coffee.”

 

It was a while before Sherlock appeared downstairs. When he did, John was standing at the kitchen table, mugs forgotten, with his phone in his hand. 

The detective stopped short in the doorway. The muscles in his jaw visibly clenched.

“The sodding _texts_ ,” he hissed, throwing his hands up. For a moment, John really thought he was going to bang his fists on his own head, like a cartoon character. “The fucking buggering _cocking_ texts.” 

John frowned, feeling off balance, first from the texts themselves and now from this display. “What—”

“You distracted me,” Sherlock growled. His long fingers worked through his hair, tugging hard. “I meant to delete them.”

John's eyes slid back to the phone screen. “Why?”

Sherlock’s head snapped up. His eyes narrowed. 

“Nothing,” he said. “Nevermind.”

“Sherlock,” John said, exasperated. The texts swirled through his head, tugging at him in an odd way. 

_Fuck you, John._

_Fuck you._

_Fuck you._

_Come back._

_Please._

There was something terribly honest there; John could sense it but not _make_ sense of it. Sherlock was always melodramatic, that was nothing new, but the snarl of _fuck you_ and the urgency of _come back_ were prickling the back of his neck with... with _something._

“You were just lying there when I came back,” John thought out loud, scrolling up and then down, up and then down. “I didn’t think you actually needed—wanted—I mean, I figured you only wanted me back here to hand you a laptop or make you tea.”

Sherlock nodded, businesslike. “Your assistance would have been ideal, yes—”

“N–no,” John interrupted, still working it out piece by piece. “If you just wanted my help you’d have tried harder to piss me off. You’d have sent photos of eyeballs actually _in_ my mug. You’d have called Harry and told her, I dunno, told her I was getting married and she wasn’t invited.” 

_Fuck you. Fuck you. Come back._ Terse. Clipped. Angry. The opposite of the man’s usual elaborate detachment. For God’s sake, even his half-attentive _hmm_ s were delicately crafted, ornate dismissals. _Fuck you_ was too blunt a weapon. It was a clenched fist where Sherlock would normally have used rope and pulleys and catapults and fire, all just to finish by slapping you in the face with your own glove.

“And you...” said John, a new thought dawning, “You let me wear your scarf. You didn’t even _mention_ it. Not once.”

Sherlock shifted uncomfortably. “I assumed you were—”

“You’re full of it.” John shook his head. “Don’t say you let me wear it because you thought I’d be cold. It has never and will never cross your mind to inquire about my temperature unless you decide to do an experiment on hypothermia.” 

The frown spreading downwards on Sherlock’s face was becoming a truly impressive parabola. John wanted to kiss it. He felt dizzy.

“Sherlock, tell me what’s going on.” John took one last hard look at _Fuck you fuck you come back_ and decided there was nothing for it. He tossed the phone to the table and moved a step closer to his flatmate. “All this time, I thought you never let yourself feel anything for anybody," he mused. Sherlock's left eye twitched, and John took it as a sign that he was on the right track. "I thought you barely noticed we were becoming friends."

His friend hesitated. Silver eyes darted down John’s face, over the table, from one corner of the floor to the other. 

“I don't have _feelings_ ,” whispered a low baritone voice. 

John bit his lip, hard. “I don’t believe you,” he said softly. The dam he’d been building in his chest since turning down Sherlock’s offer was breaking. “Sherlock, _tell me_.”

Sherlock didn’t speak. His hands hung pale and still at his sides. 

“Fine,” said John. His voice cracked, but he didn’t care. “I’ll tell you.” His hands flexed at his sides, once, twice, and then he launched himself forward, feeling like the ground had suddenly disappeared out from under him. “If you wanted it too, I’d, I’d give it a go. This—it—I mean, I dunno exactly what it would be like, really, between us—but I’m beginning to think it might be... good. It might be very... very good.” He’d moved right up to Sherlock now, face tilted back to maintain eye contact. 

Sherlock’s breath was purposely, painstakingly even. He spoke slowly, as though his processors were handling so much data it was actually, physically slowing him down. “And... what might ‘ _it_ ’ be?” 

“We could,” John searched for the best words, “be together. I could... I could wear your scarf.”

His friend had gone so still it was not even clear anymore whether he was breathing. His eyes were fixed, staring at John’s forehead. 

Exasperated, aching, and for some reason hard again somehow, John sighed. “All right, fine,” he told Sherlock. “We’ll try it again in the middle of the night, will that help? I’ll have you, Sherlock, if you’ll have me, but you’re going to have to _tell me how you feel_ , either way. I need to know.” 

Still no response at first. John was about to give it up and just leave his friend frozen there until nighttime fell, but then Sherlock twitched. His hands clapped, ridiculously, onto the sides of John’s head, holding him in place. 

“I love you,” he said, eyes finally focusing on John’s. 

“Oh, God,” said John, and then they were kissing desperately. “ _Yes_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OH good god I've finished a thing. Thanks so much for reading; you are all brilliant and lovely.


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